Monday, October 30, 2006

Once you get older, you may come to a strange realization that I recently had. See, I was given 6 months of free HBO due to the fact that Comcast is a joke of a cable service since they can't connect cable during the 6 hour range that they promise. So on HBO this month is Walk The Line. All of sudden I realized how really kick-ass Johnny Cash is. I really had no idea that he rocked that much!! I remember all too well how much my folks liked him. Strangely, this is not the first time that this has happened.You see, this happened with the movie Ray. My parents dug this guy too. And this other crazy old guy named Willie Nelson .... and this other cat named Waylon Jennings ..... and Sam & Dave ... and John Lee Hooker.Sinbad mentioned this phenomenon: Your parents used to be cool 'til they had you. The sad thing is that it's true!! Hell, my folks had an SUV long before legions of useless soccer moms lined up at the Ford dealership so they had buy more useless shit at Sharper Image at the expense of plunging our nation into war. Don't worry; my folks actually made use of the SUV: we would go on family camping trips; the dirt roads leading to one of the family's ranches are not paved and rough as hell. This old '76 Chevy Blazer had an 8-track that my folks would torture us with playing all of the aforementioned ad nauseam. Now, of course, everyone digs Cash and Willie and Ray and Sam & Dave. I can't help but remember how much I hated that music growing up. When I bought my first walkman, I listened to that thing for hours on car trips ... anything to avoid those 8-tracks. Now, if I hear Sam & Dave's "Soothe Me", I stop everything and become instantly mesmerized.But just think: someday you'll have kids and you'll be as uncool as your parents are now. I guess that is the curse of having children. Someday you'll be watering your lawn wearing sandals and black dress socks ... heh-heh.

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Jen tagged me with this one and I've been a lazy lout and never finished it. I'm as slow as George Bush is smart. So here are my answers .... Book Meme

1. One book that changed your life: The Cathcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. I know, I know .... it's so cliche. But I challenge you to find a book that sums up a cynical teen's view of the world much better. I remember reading this and it was as if I had an epiphany.

2. One book that you've read more than once: To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Such an obvious choice, isn't it? For some crazy reason, I keep coming back to this book in my life. In law school during my ethics class, our prof asked us to name an attorney, real or fictional, that we admired and why. I chose Atticus Finch for how he treated the Cunningham family (remember the family that couldn't pay him money, so they would leave chopped wood, roasted chestnuts, and food on the back porch?). I always found it so powerful that despite a client's inability to pay, he let the man keep his dignity by paying back in any way he could.

3. One book you'd want on a desert island: A complete collection of Pablo Neruda's poetry so I could sit and really absorb it.

4. One book that made you laugh: Lies by Al Franken. Amazing that a book chocked full of facts and figures can still make you laugh. But then again, he was a skit writer for SNL.

5. One book that made you cry: La Maravilla by Alfredo Vea. I had to read this while at Arizona State in my Chicano Lit class. Part of the story is about an old couple that reminded me of my grandparents. Naturally, one of them dies and you are reduced to tears everytime this cantankerous old lady recalls her husband.

6. One book you wish had been written: Love In The Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I really consider this one of the most perfect books ever written. But if you know me personally, you'll know I should have written Everyone Poops.

7. One book you wish had never been written: Anything by that raving cunt Anne Coulter. It's one thing to completely come up with bullshit that you claim is based on facts (just like that cocksucker Bill O'Reilly), but at least try to prove it with some actual facts. Al Franken has called her out on this so many times, it's like calling false start on a retarded kid during a flag football game!!

8. One book you're currently reading: Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. I know I'm behind the power curve on this one, but I am finally getting to it.

9. One book you've been meaning to read: I've started Don Quixote at least 2 or 3 times and have never finished it. It's a bit intimidating seeing how thick the book is and you can read for a few hours and only read a fraction of it!!!

10. Six people to tag: Let's see, we definitely need Lindsay, Chelle, Joel, JHD, Sonrisa, and Andi. These kids are great with the books. And if any of you other kids want to do this meme ... please by all means.

Monday, October 16, 2006

Actually this post idea came from Chelle (a.k.a. Mariemm), but I wanted to expound on it a bit longer.

CBGB's shut its doors this weekend closing out what was basically the Holy Land for punks.

So is it better to fade away hanging onto the vestiges of what you once were or morph into some trendy temporary thing devoid of any true soul?

I'm glad CBGB's took the fading away route. The landlord decided not to renew their lease, so it really wasn't a choice. BUT it's the principle I'm referring to here.

See, the club had enough street cred that it could've lent some of that to some really ass-clown performers looking to get some credibility. I'm sure someone like Ashlee Simpson would've loved to perform there so that she might be able to wear the shirt in the pic without Sid Vicious rolling over in his grave or having Joe Escalante use a 3-syllable word that would send her bird brain into complete convulsions. I'm quite certain some dude from some fucking teen-angst drama like The O.C. with his faux-hawk would try to put on a show trying to show just how "punk" he really is.

See the difference between these bands and the likes of some piece of shit from Malibu is that being a true punk is about more than wearing a fucking sparkly t-shirt that says "punk". It's more than a faux-hawk. It's more than a nose-piercing. It's about completely spitting on the establishment, not just a fashion trend. So if you ever see some kid wearing a shirt with the word "punk" scrawled across the front shopping in a Macy's at a suburban mall, you have my permission to rip the shirt off, march the kid to Sam Goody, and have him listen to "Never Mind The Bollocks".

Sunday, October 01, 2006

(Sigh) ... Once again, I have waited all year long for college football to start only to be disappointed by my alma mater's team.

Yes, once again my beloved Sun Devils have broken my heart. The ineptitude that embodies the head coach only adds to my heartbreak.

It's pathetic really to wait so long with anticipation only to have your season over a few weeks into the season.

But this has been the situation all too often with the ass-clown known as Dirk Koetter. This guy gets nearly $900K a year to produce sub-par football teams with all of the resources known to the college football world. Even Jake the Snake, complete with his new porn-stache, threw some dinero at the program to improve it's weight room.

So there it is .... I'm a 36 year old man who pathetically spends the entire year looking forward to college football season only to have his hopes dashed yet again. I truly am the defintion of schizophrenic: I keep doing the same thing over and over again hoping for a different result.

What the school doesn't realize is that, as pathetic as it might sound, college sports rankings do have an effect on how well the school is ranked in US News. While I was in law school at Cincinnati, we slipped a few spots in the rankings. Apparently had our basketball team finished better in the NCAA tourney, we would have received more applications from more students which leads to a school being more selective. If you're a school that only has 100 applicants for 90 seats, you're not that selective. If you have 150 seats and you receive 2200 applications, you're very selective. The more applications you receive, the more academically inclined your student body will be.

Look at this pic of the stadium at half-time vs. Oregon last week. WTF??? It's 3/4 empty!!! Mind you, this isn't a pre-game ceremony or a post-game cermony. This is fucking half-time!!! This is not going to help rankings of any kind!!! So my only hope is that the idiot will be fired at the end of the season. I've been calling for this since the talentless ass-nugget was hired 6 years ago, so I can say I've hated this guy from the start. So I'm hoping for this and I'm quite sure that once again, ASU will let me down by letting this moron coach another season.